Any discussion about GNOME vs. KDE is sure to end in tears. It's basically impossible to discuss which of these two Free desktop environments is better than the other, mostly because they cater to different types of people, with different needs and expectatotions. As such, Bruce Byfield decided to look at the two platforms from a different perspective: if we consider their developmental processes, which of the two is most likely to be more successful in the coming years?

I think the development/release methodology adopted by the KDE team for the KDE 4 series would have worked a lot better if they had been able to accurately predict how the distros would respond to it.

It doesn't matter how unfinished KDE 4.0 was, if no large Linux distros had incorporated it fully into their distro and just used it for testing as the KDE team recommended then it wouldn't have been "inflicted" upon some end users in the way that it was. See Linus Torvalds for example, (IIRC) he uses Fedora, and he got an early KDE 4 pushed upon him, and seeing it as too incomplete for his needs, he decided to switch to Gnome. Now the Fedora guys IMO should have held onto KDE 3 for their main users, and offered KDE 4 as an optional testing/preview update. Then there would have been fewer issues.

However, now we see that the distros do not work like this; one cannot just say "this isn't really ready for the wider masses" and necessarily expect the downstream folks to obey those wishes. Maybe if the KDE team had been a little more canny they could have predicted this and delayed the release of 4.0 a bit, still releasing it somewhat early to get the ball rolling but in more a complete state than it was.

Let me just end this by saying that I'm a big fan of KDE and a user for 6 years or so, and that actually I thought 4.0 was fine for my uses and I understand what the KDE team were trying to do with that. Really the distros should have given it a more thoughtful evaluation and not just deployed it indiscriminately as some of them did. But they didn't and maybe the KDE team were not as realistic as they could have been in failing to predict this.

P.S. Arch Linux, my distro of choice held off the upgrade till 4.1 I think it was. So my distro is better than yours. So there!